cocoonofbooks 's review for:

Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

2.5

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This book had potential, but it never really coalesced for me. Rogers did a lot of telling not showing with her characters — we get from the beginning that Grace feels the pressure to be "the best"/perfect, both from her military dad and from being a minority in a field dominated by white men. But I never felt in my bones what Grace was feeling. We're told that she feels lost, like her life plan is falling apart, etc., but I had trouble taking seriously the fact that she'd pinned her entire life on getting a job at one specific place and that she literally couldn't come up with another plan when that didn't work. The closeness she feels with her found family of friends in Portland mostly shows up in them asking her how she's doing and talking about how much they love each other, but I didn't see a lot of tangible examples of them showing up for one another. All the relationship building was in the past. And in the present, the relationship building with Yuki and her roommates was pretty minor — eventually she's pushed to call the roommates her friends, but it wasn't clear what made them so, other than hanging out watching TV and playing card games in the apartment. The romance fell flat for the same reasons. 

Everyone in this book talked to each other very dramatically about pain and monsters and the universe, but that's not a substitute for the real ways that people care for each other. To some extent it seemed like Rogers let bonding over being a minority (queer and/or a person of color and/or having mental health struggles) stand in for the entirety of relationship-building, like once people found each other and went, "Oh, you're on the outskirts like me," that was all that was needed to be bonded for life. And maybe that's true in some situations, but I need more than that out of a book.

I'm glad this book has resonated for some people, but it didn't do it for me.